You're right to compare a unicorn to a cat - even the most walkable neighborhoods aren't really what urbanists want. The most walkable neighborhoods have the great hazard of traffic - so to most, suburbia means a quiet street away from the traffic, whereas urban living means a walkable street but you have to deal with traffic. I think the dream for urbanist families of a walkable place connected to transit where kids can be independent before getting a car is, unfortunately, not today's reality.
I definitely think there is an appeal for a front and back yard, a detached house and even a single story home - stairs are inconvenient, especially with kids. A yards allow you to garden and host, a front yard decorates for the neighborhood, a backyard you party with privacy. A detached home does come with hassles but also customization and ownership - with its ills and pros.
So to most, the choice is between a quite neighborhood where they can have their own yard, but shuttle their kids everywhere and stomach commutes in traffic OR a neighborhood that's usually pricier, where kids are more independent but also interacting more with cars as pedestrians, and the tradeoff is you can walk and transit to more (but not all) of your daily errands. And sadly, for many, living in the city actually means not that much different from living in suburbia, just less green space and the traffic is at your doorstep instead of down the block.
So you've got 4 points of comparison - an urbanist dream, an urbanist present-reality, a suburbanist nightmare (which isn't completely off), and suburbia. The urbanist present is one i'd prefer to the rest, but I understand the desire for suburbia compared to that, while advocating for the unicorn.
This is great and articulates my view. I see "cities" or "urban living" as imperfectly achieved ideals, and that's why I'm confident saying most people who don't like "cities" don't really know that and can't really say that. The fact that cars *particularly* degrade urban environments is almost a cosmic irony. But it's true. The corollary here is that the "unicorns" are so rare they're elitist and unaffordable, which people see as being inherent in them. Again, I say these are expensive only because they're rare. The rarity is not a reason not to make more of them.
I like your comment about environments where kids can be increasingly independent without a car. I grew up in a row house in a dense suburb contiguous to Philadelphia. The alleyway was a linear playground continuously scanned by housewives working in their kitchens (this was the 50’s). As you grew, your range grew as well, until downtown Philadelphia was included. I don’t know how kids put up with the present setup. Seems stifling to me.
i grew up in a suburb where the neighborhoods were relatively dense but split from each other by 40mph roads. We had a lot of independence on our bikes, but yea I almost got run over countless times on the road next to my neighborhood. I get why parents don't let kids do that anymore, but the alternative - either shutting them in the house or chauffeuring them around if you can afford it - seems worse, but decidedly safer and less deadly. To me the major perk to urbanist child rearing would be to give kids their childhood back while also seeing a decrease in traffic deaths.
Also, I was a terrible driver at 16. I'm quite positive most young people, especially young men, tend to be terrible drivers. We should yank their licenses quickly, but not sentence them to lives of joblessness or aimlessness for the crime of being an average teenage driver.
Advocates of "dense, urban, walkable places" have, for decades, grotesquely failed in properly organizing and marketing themselves and their beliefs. There isn't even a succinct descriptor or label for us, like "pro-life" or "green", which I'd reckon reduces our group political impact/influence by 90% or more. There's no shared vocabulary, and it's not on the political radar.
You can see the effects of this in the misfiring "missing middle" movement. "Densification" can mean a deliberate project of building a human-scaled town of narrow streets and small shops, or it can (and in my experience almost always does) mean simply grafting five-over-ones onto the existing car-dependent landscape - amounting to a Trojan horse to line the pockets of corporate developers while putting far more cars on the road, and worsening noise, congestion, crowding, etc. for the existing residents. Add that there is often a tie-in (even if only rhetorically) with a laundry list of leftist causes and ideological hobby-horses, and the crude conservative caricature of "liberals coming for the suburbs" is all too frequently right on the money.
I sort of agree, but the issue for me is, how else are you going to permit hot housing markets to grow? Grafting 5-over-1s onto a car-dependent landscape is not ideal, but it may be the only way to get anything built at all, and that extra density may eventually make it possible to convert some short car trips into walks/bike rides, especially if there's a mixed-use element. (A big apartment building with a supermarket underneath is good for traffic.)
I guess what some see as "liberals coming for the suburbs" I see as reality coming for the suburbs - the economies/job markets have outgrown the built environment, and there's no mechanism in suburbia to allow that next level of development. That's the conundrum.
The economics of a human-scaled town of narrow streets and small shops doesn't work until you have a transit network that works well enough for most people to ditch their cars, because until you get to that point the residents of these towns still need cars to get to work (which means traffic hell on narrow streets), and the shops can't stay in business without parking lots unless there's sufficient foot traffic to replace it. There's maybe three cities in America that can make this work. The rest of America simply can't put together a functioning transit system if their lives dependent on it. It doesn't help that most transit in America is somehow thrice the price and run by bureaucrats who have no interest in prioritizing any actual quality-of-life for ridership.
This is partly true. Europeans drive plenty: in 2016 cars carried 72% of passenger-km there versus 79% in the USA. However, street parking plus alleys and underground or perimeter lots allows for plenty of parking space. Where human-scaling really slashes car use are the small but frequent daily trips to run errands, grab a coffee, take your kids to school or meet friends - which are replaced not by public transit but by walking, sometimes biking.
The real and difficult problem is that once the grey-goo of sprawl expands across an area, it becomes nearly impossible to retrofit in the way that human-scaling requires. The roads and streets are too wide and there are too many individual property owners. To build a self-sustaining (in terms of everyday services) human-scale town you need a vaguely circular region at least three-quarters of a mile in diameter, across which you are able to demolish the existing road network (if any) and the overwhelming majority of existing structures. The only places where you can do this in practice are greenfield sites far outside of cities (see California Forever) or the very occasional instances where an old airport, prison, or steel mill etc. is being sold off for redevelopment.
I mean, coffee and groceries are one thing, but at the end of the day you have to go to work, and work may not be conveniently located within a mile of your home, so the transit needs to exist or else everybody is stuck driving to work anyway. In major Asian cities, the roads are wide, the property owners are many, and while younger students walk, by the time you reach high school it's often split between bike and transit. Or is Tokyo not considered a "human-scale" city?
After 100 years of crazy experiments on human settlements, we have such a poor understanding of all these issues now. So yes, we have very imperfect choices, and you’re 100% correct in your description that the historic American small town is, in fact, urban. It’s simply how we built human settlements for thousands of years, before the Great Experimenting began in the 1910s and 20s.
That all said, I definitely think there’s a fairly sizeable percentage of Americans that really like their suburbia. I have many family members in this camp. They understand what I like and why, but it’s just not for them. We, as urbanists, should also be honest that some suburbia is quite lovely and can be very liveable. It’s not all one, broad brush.
Agree. I shared a Google Maps screenshot on Twitter yesterday of a development out at the western edge of Prince William County (40 miles from downtown D.C.) where you have houses *right* up against each other, new big-box stores with huge parking lots, etc. To me that's the worst option - none of the privacy of the country, none of the community or amenities of the city. But the inner suburbs in the D.C. area are far more pleasant than that. They're not at all the same thing. I always make that distinction in my head, maybe I should repeat it every time I write one of these pieces!
Or people just prefer suburban life and are reasonably rational about that. I know I do, I have zero interest in living in a city ever again. Maybe different people just have different preferences, and should be allowed to choose for themselves.
Yes, they should. City life is not for everyone. (Look, I live in a suburb, but a diverse and relatively dense one, and I the D.C. area suburbs have a lot of urban characteristics.) But we so severely underbuild real urban environments that the people who want *that* choice are barely able to make it. Most of suburbia will not change that much even if urbanists get everything they want. There just aren't that many people.
Yeah, ideally I prefer a large manor house in a walled estate (at least 5 acres) across the street from a grocery store and a metro stop where I’d be walking distance to everything (very high density, for other people). And the government should subsidize this
You're right to compare a unicorn to a cat - even the most walkable neighborhoods aren't really what urbanists want. The most walkable neighborhoods have the great hazard of traffic - so to most, suburbia means a quiet street away from the traffic, whereas urban living means a walkable street but you have to deal with traffic. I think the dream for urbanist families of a walkable place connected to transit where kids can be independent before getting a car is, unfortunately, not today's reality.
I definitely think there is an appeal for a front and back yard, a detached house and even a single story home - stairs are inconvenient, especially with kids. A yards allow you to garden and host, a front yard decorates for the neighborhood, a backyard you party with privacy. A detached home does come with hassles but also customization and ownership - with its ills and pros.
So to most, the choice is between a quite neighborhood where they can have their own yard, but shuttle their kids everywhere and stomach commutes in traffic OR a neighborhood that's usually pricier, where kids are more independent but also interacting more with cars as pedestrians, and the tradeoff is you can walk and transit to more (but not all) of your daily errands. And sadly, for many, living in the city actually means not that much different from living in suburbia, just less green space and the traffic is at your doorstep instead of down the block.
So you've got 4 points of comparison - an urbanist dream, an urbanist present-reality, a suburbanist nightmare (which isn't completely off), and suburbia. The urbanist present is one i'd prefer to the rest, but I understand the desire for suburbia compared to that, while advocating for the unicorn.
This is great and articulates my view. I see "cities" or "urban living" as imperfectly achieved ideals, and that's why I'm confident saying most people who don't like "cities" don't really know that and can't really say that. The fact that cars *particularly* degrade urban environments is almost a cosmic irony. But it's true. The corollary here is that the "unicorns" are so rare they're elitist and unaffordable, which people see as being inherent in them. Again, I say these are expensive only because they're rare. The rarity is not a reason not to make more of them.
I like your comment about environments where kids can be increasingly independent without a car. I grew up in a row house in a dense suburb contiguous to Philadelphia. The alleyway was a linear playground continuously scanned by housewives working in their kitchens (this was the 50’s). As you grew, your range grew as well, until downtown Philadelphia was included. I don’t know how kids put up with the present setup. Seems stifling to me.
i grew up in a suburb where the neighborhoods were relatively dense but split from each other by 40mph roads. We had a lot of independence on our bikes, but yea I almost got run over countless times on the road next to my neighborhood. I get why parents don't let kids do that anymore, but the alternative - either shutting them in the house or chauffeuring them around if you can afford it - seems worse, but decidedly safer and less deadly. To me the major perk to urbanist child rearing would be to give kids their childhood back while also seeing a decrease in traffic deaths.
Also, I was a terrible driver at 16. I'm quite positive most young people, especially young men, tend to be terrible drivers. We should yank their licenses quickly, but not sentence them to lives of joblessness or aimlessness for the crime of being an average teenage driver.
Hence, YIMBY :)
Advocates of "dense, urban, walkable places" have, for decades, grotesquely failed in properly organizing and marketing themselves and their beliefs. There isn't even a succinct descriptor or label for us, like "pro-life" or "green", which I'd reckon reduces our group political impact/influence by 90% or more. There's no shared vocabulary, and it's not on the political radar.
You can see the effects of this in the misfiring "missing middle" movement. "Densification" can mean a deliberate project of building a human-scaled town of narrow streets and small shops, or it can (and in my experience almost always does) mean simply grafting five-over-ones onto the existing car-dependent landscape - amounting to a Trojan horse to line the pockets of corporate developers while putting far more cars on the road, and worsening noise, congestion, crowding, etc. for the existing residents. Add that there is often a tie-in (even if only rhetorically) with a laundry list of leftist causes and ideological hobby-horses, and the crude conservative caricature of "liberals coming for the suburbs" is all too frequently right on the money.
I sort of agree, but the issue for me is, how else are you going to permit hot housing markets to grow? Grafting 5-over-1s onto a car-dependent landscape is not ideal, but it may be the only way to get anything built at all, and that extra density may eventually make it possible to convert some short car trips into walks/bike rides, especially if there's a mixed-use element. (A big apartment building with a supermarket underneath is good for traffic.)
I guess what some see as "liberals coming for the suburbs" I see as reality coming for the suburbs - the economies/job markets have outgrown the built environment, and there's no mechanism in suburbia to allow that next level of development. That's the conundrum.
The economics of a human-scaled town of narrow streets and small shops doesn't work until you have a transit network that works well enough for most people to ditch their cars, because until you get to that point the residents of these towns still need cars to get to work (which means traffic hell on narrow streets), and the shops can't stay in business without parking lots unless there's sufficient foot traffic to replace it. There's maybe three cities in America that can make this work. The rest of America simply can't put together a functioning transit system if their lives dependent on it. It doesn't help that most transit in America is somehow thrice the price and run by bureaucrats who have no interest in prioritizing any actual quality-of-life for ridership.
This is partly true. Europeans drive plenty: in 2016 cars carried 72% of passenger-km there versus 79% in the USA. However, street parking plus alleys and underground or perimeter lots allows for plenty of parking space. Where human-scaling really slashes car use are the small but frequent daily trips to run errands, grab a coffee, take your kids to school or meet friends - which are replaced not by public transit but by walking, sometimes biking.
The real and difficult problem is that once the grey-goo of sprawl expands across an area, it becomes nearly impossible to retrofit in the way that human-scaling requires. The roads and streets are too wide and there are too many individual property owners. To build a self-sustaining (in terms of everyday services) human-scale town you need a vaguely circular region at least three-quarters of a mile in diameter, across which you are able to demolish the existing road network (if any) and the overwhelming majority of existing structures. The only places where you can do this in practice are greenfield sites far outside of cities (see California Forever) or the very occasional instances where an old airport, prison, or steel mill etc. is being sold off for redevelopment.
I mean, coffee and groceries are one thing, but at the end of the day you have to go to work, and work may not be conveniently located within a mile of your home, so the transit needs to exist or else everybody is stuck driving to work anyway. In major Asian cities, the roads are wide, the property owners are many, and while younger students walk, by the time you reach high school it's often split between bike and transit. Or is Tokyo not considered a "human-scale" city?
After 100 years of crazy experiments on human settlements, we have such a poor understanding of all these issues now. So yes, we have very imperfect choices, and you’re 100% correct in your description that the historic American small town is, in fact, urban. It’s simply how we built human settlements for thousands of years, before the Great Experimenting began in the 1910s and 20s.
That all said, I definitely think there’s a fairly sizeable percentage of Americans that really like their suburbia. I have many family members in this camp. They understand what I like and why, but it’s just not for them. We, as urbanists, should also be honest that some suburbia is quite lovely and can be very liveable. It’s not all one, broad brush.
Agree. I shared a Google Maps screenshot on Twitter yesterday of a development out at the western edge of Prince William County (40 miles from downtown D.C.) where you have houses *right* up against each other, new big-box stores with huge parking lots, etc. To me that's the worst option - none of the privacy of the country, none of the community or amenities of the city. But the inner suburbs in the D.C. area are far more pleasant than that. They're not at all the same thing. I always make that distinction in my head, maybe I should repeat it every time I write one of these pieces!
Or people just prefer suburban life and are reasonably rational about that. I know I do, I have zero interest in living in a city ever again. Maybe different people just have different preferences, and should be allowed to choose for themselves.
Yes, they should. City life is not for everyone. (Look, I live in a suburb, but a diverse and relatively dense one, and I the D.C. area suburbs have a lot of urban characteristics.) But we so severely underbuild real urban environments that the people who want *that* choice are barely able to make it. Most of suburbia will not change that much even if urbanists get everything they want. There just aren't that many people.
You and your readers might like my substack, The New Country Town, and even better, the book it is based on: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00U0C9HKW
Yeah, ideally I prefer a large manor house in a walled estate (at least 5 acres) across the street from a grocery store and a metro stop where I’d be walking distance to everything (very high density, for other people). And the government should subsidize this